Chapter 34
The knock on his door sounded
again. “I said go away!” Vegeta shouted, still hunched over the table in the
room, reading the printouts.
“Come on, Vegeta,” Zarbon’s
voice came angrily from outside the door. “You’ve been in there for three
days!”
“GO AWAY!” Vegeta screamed, arm
lashing about until it found something to throw at the door. His hand let the
object fly, and a crystal vase met its end on the smooth surface of the door
with an ear-splitting crash.
“Oh my god, you crazy little
bastard,” Zarbon grumbled. “You spent how long pestering me to train you, then
you don’t let me sleep because you want to train, and then you lock yourself in
the room and refuse to come out! What in the hell is going on?”
“What part of ‘go away’ don’t
you understand?” screeched Vegeta, absolutely furious. “I am busy, Zarbon!”
“Busy with what? What could you
possibly have to do that’s more interesting than training? Let’s face it,
Vegeta, you’re not exactly a renaissance man. All you do is scream and fight!”
“Gaaaah! Shut up!!” Vegeta
howled. “Your ruining my concentration!”
“Damn you,” Zarbon spat, the
sound of him pounding the door with his fist resounding in Vegeta’s room.
Vegeta turned and stared at the
door in fury. “If you knock down that door you had better start praying because
I’m going to send you directly to hell!” Vegeta thundered.
He could hear Zarbon making
little angry noises and could almost picture the pout on Zarbon’s perfect face.
“Fine, see if I care,” he heard the green-haired man mumble.
“Good riddance,” Vegeta couldn’t
help himself from adding, then returned to analyzing the printouts. So far he
felt like he had a good grasp of the components, but he didn’t want to rub it
in the woman’s face until he had the whole set of blueprints memorized. He knew
what each part did and where it went, but he knew he still lacked the technical
know-how to be able to make it work once he put it back together again, and
manufacturing was so far beyond him it pained his pride to think about it.
Thank goodness the old man had been of help. The woman’s sire had been able to
access the data within a matter of hours and was even willing to keep the whole
thing quiet, for a price. Oh well, Zarbon was bound to have a spare
communicator console. It would be worth all the pain, all the throbbing in his
head and burning of his eyes, to see the look of utter shock on her face. He
couldn’t wait. That thought brought him back to his situation and he leaned
back in his chair, brining the plans up so he could read them better. Not
long now, he thought, and continued to commit the information to memory.
She hummed to herself as she
worked, quickly undoing screws as she opened up another of the
seemingly-endless panels. The sounds of Radditz swearing under his breath as he
tried to reconnect wiring reached her ears but didn’t penetrate her
consciousness, which was focused entirely on the task at hand. So into her work
was she that she didn’t hear the footsteps coming up behind her and failed to
notice the shadow cast on her work until the person spoke. “You’re putting that
in the wrong spot,” she heard a deep voice say.
She glanced up in time to see
Radditz’s face darken with embarrassment and frustration. “I apologize,” Radditz
said haltingly. “Where should it go?”
“On the next connector, the one
to the left,” the voice replied. “Any fool would know that.”
She finally recognized the voice
and turned slowly, feeling her jaw tighten as the anticipation of
unpleasantness hit her. It was him, it was Vegeta standing there behind her,
pointing at what Radditz was working on with a smug, imperious smile on his
face. “Why don’t you get out of here, Vegeta,” she growled, continuing to undo
the plate she was working on. “We don’t need rookies in our way.”
“You think I don’t know what’s
going on?” he asked with a raised eyebrow, arms crossed over his chest.
“I know you don’t know what’s
going on. You don’t have the slightest idea of what we’re dealing with,” she
replied haughtily.
“And you and Radditz do, I
suppose,” he said.
She didn’t like the way his
expression was settling on his face like a viper ready to strike. “Of course,”
she said with bravado. “Radditz and I are the closest to experts you’ll ever
see.”
Vegeta smiled, this time showing
a few of his teeth in the corner of his mouth. “Then why are you letting him
connect the energy component data wire with the weapons system profiler update
wire?” he asked softly.
“What?” she said, feeling cold
and hot at the same time as both rage and shock raced through her.
“And you, that panel you’re
opening only contains one of the energy generators, of which you’ve already
examined three without completely understanding their function,” he continued,
pointing with a gloved hand at some of the mechanical litter that surrounded
them.
She felt her fist close around
her screwdriver and begin to shake with the force she was using to clench the
tool, her knuckles white as she spoke between clenched teeth. “And how did you
get so knowledgeable all of a sudden?” she growled.
Vegeta shrugged nonchalantly and
knelt on the floor beside her, his tail uncoiling from around his waist and
waving slowly back and forth in the air behind him. “I always was, you just
never asked me.”
“Then why didn’t you just do
this whole damn thing yourself and save me the trouble?” she snarled, becoming
angry. “How dare you let me work on this thing for months when you already know
all about it?”
He shook his head and took the
screwdriver from her roughly, starting to undo the screws of a different panel.
“It’s not like that at all. If you didn’t see each component how could you mass
produce them?”
She folded her arms over her
chest and glared at him bitterly. “So then what’s this really about?”
“I still need you to manufacture
these things,” he said. “We don’t have the facilities in my empire to do such a
thing.”
“And why not?” she replied
angrily. “Isn’t your empire enlightened enough?”
Vegeta smiled again, reveling in
her frustration. Oh, he didn’t need to kill her- torturing her was so much more
fun! “Sadly, no. All the worlds we are trying to integrate right now that are
advanced enough to have the means to do such things are the ones fighting us
the hardest. Therefore we must turn to your pathetic efforts instead.”
“Hey, this is not pathetic!” she
shouted, standing up in her vehemence. “I think we’ve done a pretty good job
for the few months we’ve worked on this. It’s halfway through summer already,
for heaven’s sake!”
“Well, you’ll do better now that
I’ve decided to help you,” he said simply, beginning to undo the panel,
secretly anxious to see the actual object and not just the endless diagrams he
had studied.
“Augh!” she cried in
frustration. “There’s nothing I can say to get you to leave, is there?” she
grumbled.
He smiled again, flashing her a
dark look with those endlessly black eyes. “No,” he replied with cold glee.
“Fine. Let’s cut the crap, then,
and just get to it,” she mumbled.
Vegeta looked up and across the
ravaged pod. “You’re dismissed, Radditz,” he said softly.
“What?” Radditz exclaimed, cold
apprehension stealing over his insides.
“I said you’re dismissed. Go
play with your traitor brother and his brat.”
Radditz stared at Vegeta in
disbelief. He did not want to leave Bulma alone in the room with Vegeta, that
was for sure, but he had also received a direct order from his prince. “Are you
sure?” he asked hesitantly.
“Yes,” Vegeta hissed, the slight
humor that had possessed him a few moments before evaporating rapidly.
Radditz looked over at Bulma in
alarm. “It’s okay, Radditz. If you’re with Goku I’ll know how to get in touch
with you if I...er, we, should need any help.”
“If you’re sure,” he said
quietly. He stood, made a short bow to Vegeta, and left the room, stopping at
the door to look over his shoulder at Bulma, who promptly waved him on with a
motion of her hands. Sighing, he turned and went away.
“Poor thing,” she whispered.
Vegeta raised an eyebrow.
“Forget him,” he said abruptly. “We have work to do.”
She sighed and knelt beside him,
watching his brisk movements as he undid the panel. “We certainly do.”
Several hours later she felt as
if headway was being made for the first time. She hated to admit it, but Vegeta
really seemed to know what he was talking about. Everything he had said so far
had made perfect sense, although it was still obvious to her that he didn’t
have a clue about manufacturing. She watched as he finally removed his gloves,
surfacing for a moment to throw them aside and revealing his shapely hands, the
fingers long and square at the ends. As she looked at his face she realized it
was a good thing that he wasn’t wearing anything other than the spandex black
bodysuit, because he was absolutely covered in dark grease. The black substance
clung to his cheekbones and forehead, and even his sharp, straight nose had a
liberal coating. She couldn’t hold back any longer and finally broke out
laughing.
“What?” he asked angrily, his
heavy eyebrows falling into a deeper scowl than was customary.
“You’re covered in grease,” she
giggled, pointing at him with one hand.
He muttered something under his
breath and began to wipe at his face with a sleeve. “Is it gone?” he asked
impatiently, fixing her with a dark stare.
“Heavens, no,” she giggled
harder, for he had merely smeared the grease all over his entire face. “You’re
a mess.”
He smiled back, the expression
menacing. “You’re not so clean yourself,” he said, gesturing at areas on his
face to show where she had grease on hers.
Bulma’s mouth opened in a startled
‘o’ and she quickly tried to wipe it off, but to no avail. With a growl she
reached into the innards of the pod and managed to collect a good, juicy
handful of the alien grease and flung it at Vegeta’s head without a second
thought. The goo hit him in the jaw, splattering the left side of his face and
shoulder.
“Why, you,” he snarled, eyes
alight with the challenge, and fashioned his own ball of grease, managing to
smack her right between the eyes. She wailed in dismay and wiped it out of her
eyes.
“Okay, you’re going to get it
now, mister,” she threatened, scrabbling to form a grease ball before he did.
“You’ll never beat me, woman,”
he challenged back, quickly grasping for more ammunition. Soon clumps of grease
large and small were sailing through the air, coating the walls and each other
with sticky, slimy blackness. Bulma found a particularly large batch and
clutched it eagerly, hurling it at Vegeta’s head with all her might. He laughed
and dodged to the side easily and was about to launch his counterattack when he
saw that her face had gone white, her eyes focused on a point behind him.
“Well, I seem to have found more
than I bargained for,” Zarbon’s voice said from behind him.
Vegeta turned around slowly,
eyes widening when he saw that the grease ball she had thrown had hit the
green-haired man squarely in the nose, covering his entire face, neck,
shoulders, and chest with the runny black goo. Zarbon’s face twisted in disgust
beneath the slime and he quickly wiped it out of his eyes, leaving pale
blue-green half circles in the dark crud below his eyes. Vegeta blinked several
times, then burst out in genuine laughter.
“Oh, you should see yourself!”
he cackled, pointing. He glanced at Bulma and saw her visibly relax, her
shoulders lowering themselves as she too began to laugh.
“Oh, sure, it’s funny when it’s
not you,” Zarbon said bitterly, flicking grease on the floor with a motion of
his hands, then looked up at the laughing pair. “Okay, so maybe it is you two
as well,” he amended, his fine eyebrows disrupting the grease as he frowned.
“You got a little in your hair,”
Bulma offered, pointing.
Zarbon’s golden eyes widened in
horror. “I’ll be back,” he blurted, and rocketed from the room. Vegeta and
Bulma laughed harder and he turned to her to find her wiping tears from her
eyes.
“I haven’t laughed that hard in
a long time,” she said merrily, fixing sparkling blue eyes on Vegeta.
He said nothing for several
moments, but for him the hilarity of the moment was over. “He’ll be back,” he
said solemnly. “And then he’ll want me to attend to something else, so I advise
you work more quickly.”
“Me? Why just me? I’m doing just
as much work as you are?” she argued, but after a second or two her face
cracked with a smile once again. He shot her his dirtiest look and she shook
her head, grinning and closing her eyes. “Nothing personal,” she chuckled, “but
you’re still absolutely covered in that gooey stuff.”
“You are too,” he reminded her,
a smile flickering across his sculpted lips for just a moment. “Let’s get back
to work.”
“All right,” she agreed, and
dove back into her task with renewed vigor.
She stepped out of the shower,
rubbing her hair against the towel vigorously as she walked from the bathroom
into her bedroom. Discarding the towel on the bed, she shook her head from side
to side and picked up the silken negligee of the sort she had taken to wearing
to bed the past few months. She sighed with simple pleasure as the light fabric
of the nightie whispered over her clean skin, giving her entire body a little
shake to settle the material correctly over her curves. Running her hand
through her thick wet hair she wandered to the window, looking out over the
quiet nighttime gardens of the compound’s ground and the summer stars overhead.
The wind rustled the greenery gently and the scent of flowers wafted up to her
through the open window, the curtains fluttering slightly in the breeze as she
leaned against the sill. As she looked at the stars again she wondered where
Vejiitasei had once been, and suddenly the night sky seemed very lonely to her.
A deep stillness settled in her chest and she bowed her head, thinking of how
it would feel to have her home destroyed by someone in her youth and then
having to enduring being raised by that same person. Was that why Vegeta wanted
to die so badly? To escape that shame? She was about to turn away from the
window when movement caught her eye. Pressing herself to the sill, she
contemplated going out on her balcony for a moment, then decided against it in
favor of the cover the curtains provided her. She peered out into the darkness
and saw that Vegeta had entered a bright patch in the backyard, the light
playing off his softly shining skin, and she realized that he was still wet
from bathing. He stood shirtless on the lawn, his broad, muscular chest rising
and falling gently with his breathing. His spiky tower of hair moved back and
forth as he turned his head, apparently scanning his surroundings. Then, slowly
but surely, he began to move through a series of katas, his limbs cutting
graceful lines into the night. Bulma retreated into her bedroom and
extinguished the light, running back to the window and gasping when she saw he
had fixed his eyes upon her room, the black irises even darker than the night
itself, as if they were the reason for the failing of the light instead of the
absence of the sun. Fading back into the curtains, Bulma found herself holding
her breath until he looked away and returned to his workout. For long moments
she watched him run through his routine, his body finally shiny with sweat. She
put her fingers to her lips and watched as his corded muscles extended and
contracted, the raw power in his body poorly concealed by his minimalist
movements. Suddenly his entire body tensed and he whirled towards the building,
the lines of his form startled. Then, without warning, he took a few steps away
from the house and took off into the sky with a hiss of displaced air and
sparkling of aura. She backed away from the windows and the curtains whipped
about madly from the sudden disturbance, then threw wide the door and ran down
the hall.
She was just rounding the corner
when she hit something solid, very, very solid. Stumbling a few steps backward,
she looked up and saw that she had collided with Zarbon. The tall man was
imposing, even clad in only a towel, his pale blue-green skin rippling with
sculpted muscle and his long green hair hanging wet halfway down his back.
“Well, you’re looking well this evening,” he said, his golden eyes suddenly
seeming like those of a predator.
“Thanks,” she said. “You need to
put on some clothes.”
He raised a fine green eyebrow.
“You think so?” he said nonchalantly. “Well, I’m not the only one,” he said quietly,
gesturing at her state of dress with the hand that wasn’t holding up the towel.
Bulma felt her cheeks flame.
“Hmmm. I think you’re right,” she muttered, looking at the floor.
“So where were you going in such
a hurry?” he asked, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
She nearly blurted out that she
was running into the yard to see what direction Vegeta had gone, but suddenly
she didn’t feel like disclosing that information. “I wanted to see if Radditz
came back,” she mumbled. “I felt bad for him after Vegeta kicked him out.”
Zarbon’s eyebrows came together
ever so slightly and she knew he wasn’t buying her story. “I don’t think he has
returned yet, but your mother is down in the kitchen waiting for him,” he said.
Bulma shifted from one foot to
the other. Her mother was probably what scared Vegeta away- she was the only
person on the planet that he seemed to actively fear. “Well, maybe I’ll go down
there and tell her not to wait up.”
Zarbon nodded, moving past her
but not turning his back on her, keeping his golden eyes fastened upon her
face. “Prudent,” he murmured, and before she could blink he had gone off down
the hallway.
She shivered even in the warmth
of the hallway. His eyes always seemed to look right through her. Zarbon was
always so cold to her and that scared her. His calm couldn’t be meddled with
and took away her illusions of having any sort of power in their interchanges.
Radditz was pitifully easy to order around and at least Vegeta was hot and
angry all the time and therefore more easily dealt with. Vegeta was nothing if
not predictable in his conversations, the thought making a smile rise unbidden
to her face. She immediately changed her expression to a scowl and stormed off
down the hall. The second she stopped thinking of him as an arrogant, deadly
thorn in her side was the day she would know she had truly lost touch with
reality.
To her surprise Radditz actually was in the kitchen, having just arrived. Her
mother was already busy with tea and cookies, which Radditz was consuming in
his usual face-stuffing fashion. “How was your day with Goku?” she asked
politely, ignoring where on her body his eyes became glued the second he saw
her. She probably should have taken Zarbon’s advice and covered up before she
came down to see him. Come to think of it, she often felt like a piece of meat
when he looked at her, a course to be devoured rather than a thinking,
breathing person.
“It was fine,” he replied
between mouthfuls. “And your day with the Prince?”
“We got so much done!” she
replied proudly, not noticing the tightness that spread across his face at her
words. “Despite being such an arrogant bastard Vegeta really knows what he’s
talking about.”
“That’s nice,” Radditz said
coldly, lowering his eyes to his food.
“Isn’t it though?” Mrs. Briefs
chimed in. “Now you’ll have so much more time to spend with your brother!”
Bulma shot her mother a dirty
look. “Mom,” she said cautiously, feeling the mood in the room darken and not
wanting her mother to say anything inadvertently harmful.
“I think it’s so nice that you
and that darling Vegeta are finally getting along better, too,” Mrs. Briefs
continued. “It’ll make everything so much nicer around here.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Bulma
grumbled, watching Radditz’s expression ripple as alternate phases of emotion
and control moved across it. His dark eyes latched onto hers and a sudden pity
rose in her chest, a pity that stuck to her bones and made her want to cry.
That poor, poor man. He had absolutely nothing going in his favor. Was mere
pity enough reason to love? Her head suddenly felt heavy and she realized just
how taxing the day had been. “I’m going to bed,” she muttered and left the
room.
Vegeta was already high in the
sky after only minutes after takeoff, casually surveying the ground as it
rocketed past far beneath him. The starlight shone off of different bodies of
water, and he realized for the first time just how rich in resources the planet
Earth was. No wonder the humans had time to sit around and worry about such
trivial things as fashion and what was on television- their productive world
practically handed life to them on a golden platter daily. It wasn’t like on
Arlia, where agriculture was meager at best and the planet was sparsely
vegetated. Atlia and his race had a hard life on their inhospitable planet, and
perhaps that was why he liked it. He liked the hard life- it reminded him he
actually was alive. If he was still feeling pain, he was alive. But he wouldn’t
be alive much longer. He would battle Freeza, he knew that much, and he almost
certainly wouldn’t survive it. The best he could do was use his life as a
weapon. That was the only advantage he had over Freeza- he was willing to die
and the tyrant wasn’t. Suddenly a large power loomed in his extra sense and he
expelled ki to halt his movement cold. Head turning from side to side he
finally pinpointed it, off to the north a few yards. He had been so sunken in
thought he hadn’t even noticed it. The Earth warriors seemed to be able to
control their power level as well, which didn’t make them easier to spot,
although it would be a useful trick to learn. Then he recognized his watcher
and his eyes narrowed. “You,” he breathed. “What do you want?”
A harsh laugh rippled smoothly
through the sky. “I want to take you for a test run,” the voice wound into the
air from between sharp white teeth.
Vegeta scowled at the turbaned
form. “I have no business with you,” he said sternly. “Leave here before you
get hurt.”
The Namekian laughed again. “You
might think that bravado will aid you, but that is not the case here.”
“You’re wasting my time,” Vegeta
growled.
“Like that matters to me,” the
Namek said. “I just want to make sure I’m not wasting my time.”
Vegeta’s eyes narrowed. “Wait,
aren’t you the one training Kakarott’s brat?” he asked suddenly.
The Namek cocked his head
slightly. “Gohan? Why, yes, I am.”
“Then where does he get his
power? Why can’t I get a handle on where it’s coming from?” Vegeta inquired,
crossing his arms over his bare chest.
“He has such a vast reservoir of
power that none of us really know its extent. Unfortunately he only seems to be
able to access it under duress. Fortunately battle seems to fit his criteria.”
“Do you think that has anything
to do with his mother?” Vegeta asked, suddenly curious.
The Namekian looked surprised,
and Vegeta knew that he hadn’t expected this to turn into a quizzing session.
“Perhaps. Half-Saiyans might be more powerful than humans. I don’t know enough
about your kind to make a fair assumption.”
Vegeta made a mental note to
never let Nappa come near Earth. All he needed were a bunch of powerful
half-Saiyans running around with Nappa’s intellect. “Interesting. But you’re
not from this planet, green man. Why do you stay?”
The Namekian smiled again,
showing his long, sharp canines. “You and I are a lot alike,” he said quietly.
Vegeta’s mind flashed back to
earlier in his mission to Earth, remembering the Namekian saying those same
words when they were near one another. “What do you mean?” he asked sharply.
Again that low laugh. “We’re the
bad guys, you and I. We’re the aliens, the unknown quantities with the heavens
only know how much power. They don’t trust us and yet they still look to us.
We’re loners and yet we find reasons to stay around people. We’ve found reasons
to spare this planet from our troubles.”
“What’s your reason?” Vegeta
interjected.
The Namekian closed his eyes and
shook his head. “Why, Gohan, of course. If it weren’t for him I would have
killed his father and enslaved this planet long ago. Do you know what your
reason is yet?”
Vegeta’s scowl intensified. “I
don’t have a reason and doubt I ever will,” he growled.
The Namekian shrugged, suddenly
tossing aside his turban and heavy cape. “Just as well. You won’t have anything
to regret if I kill you.”
“You talk big for such a puny
power level,” Vegeta snarled, then quieted as his eyes grew wide.
The corkscrew of light was
directed right at his head.
33 / Bulma’s Hideout / 35